If you're wondering why the relatively tame article above got scrubbed from GQ, that's because it's the revised version of the article. This is a version that was captured 5 hours earlier from what I can tell:
Highlights include (emphasis mine):
Zaslav presided over "Discovery’s transition from educational programming to reality slop—which is, of course, a much more lucrative business model."
"But Zaslav did himself no favors, and did little to blur that binary, when announcing the merger of the HBOMax and Discovery+ streaming services in a quarterly earnings call—which included a much-derided infographic deeming HBOMax’s scripted programming as “male skew,” “appointment viewing,” and “lean in” (?), while Discovery+’s unscripted shows were “female skew” “comfort viewing,” and thus ”lean back” (?!?)."
"And while they insisted Zaslav had assured them “that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him,” subsequent reporting indicated that TCM’s staff had been cut from 90 employees to a skeletal 20."
"Nearly lost in the hullabaloo was yet another of the company’s exhaustive attempts to squeeze a profit from its assets: a $500 million deal to sell around half of their film and TV-music library. In a perhaps too-good-to-be-true detail, the sale would reportedly include “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca—the musical fanfare that plays before every Warner Bros. feature film."
"Barely a month ago, Graydon Carter was hosting a party in Zaslav’s honor at Cannes, all but crowning him as the heir apparent to Jack Warner. But there’s a crucial difference between Zaslav and the old-school moguls he’s attempting to emulate: They loved movies, and cared about filmmakers. Zaslav sees movies as “content,” sees filmmakers as “content creators,” and is only interested in maintaining, preserving, and presenting “content” that can make him and his stockholders a quick buck. Anything that doesn’t, he’ll happily gut. He’s closer to Logan Roy than Jack Warner and there is a genuine, understandable fear that his bean-counting represents not just shrugging indifference but outright hostility to cinema and its rich history."
"In Pretty Woman, Richard Gere stars as Edward Lewis, a corporate raider who buys companies “that are in financial difficulty” and sells off their pieces. “So it's sort of like stealing cars and selling them for the parts, right?” asks call girl Vivian (Julia Roberts), when he explains what he does, and it’s hard not to think of Lewis when looking over Zaslav’s reign at Warner Bros Discovery, stepping into the distressed conglomerate and stripping it for parts.
Edward Lewis, however, is at least honest about what he does. “You don't make anything,” Vivian notes, and he agrees; “You don’t build anything,” she continues, and he concurs with that as well. And perhaps that’s why David Zaslav is earning a concerning reputation so far. He’s out here carrying on like a mogul, but based on his performance to date, he’s only good at breaking things."
